Hot on the heels of launching its Web news-tracking service Political Streams, the Live Labs team at Microsoft has released a tool called Thumbtack. Similar to Listas, a previous Microsoft Live Labs project, Thumbtack lets users grab chunks of information from Web pages and store it in the cloud.
These chunks of information can be tagged and strewn about canvas pages as self contained ecosystems of content. Users can go in to edit them at any time and invite others to view their work. There is, however, no real-time collaboration, meaning that your collection can be shared, but not worked on at the same time.
With Thumbtack, Microsoft seems to have learned that not everyone uses Internet Explorer. To that end, the company now provides a bookmarklet that lets users grab Web content, marking a step forward from Listas' use of an installed toolbar. It gives users the option to tag and preview content before sending it to Microsoft's servers.
The big caveat is that there's no support for Google's Chrome browser and minimal support for Firefox. Mozilla users miss out on the special IE-only canvas view mode, which lets them maneuver their notes around a virtual workspace. Non-IE users are also unable to use the copy function, which lets them temporarily put an entire Thumbtack stack in their clipboard before pasting it into another collection.
Users are given an unlimited amount of storage, which is something that might change, once the service leaves its "technology preview" status. The application handles full-resolution photos from the Web, and Microsoft says video compatibility is coming in a later version.
I worry that Microsoft is introducing Thumbtack at a bad time. There are already a handful of Web social-clipping services that I think do this with far more ease for the end user. More notably Evernote and FriendFeed, both of which have much more intuitive bookmarklets and simpler organizational methods. Worse yet, this isn't taking advantage of Microsoft's existing, and recently revamped, Live services, which lets users store their stuff and interact with each other. This is simply giving them yet another bucket in which to store information.
To Microsoft's credit, moving away from requiring Internet Explorer to really make use of one of its services is a step forward, albeit with removal of two of its most helpful elements--the canvas view, and copy and paste.
If you're curious, here's an overview of how it works:
Microsoft's Live Labs team has just released a new way to track political discourse on the Web. Called Political Streams, the tool tracks news stories on both blogs and traditional-news sites, and ranks it based on velocity and overall coverage.
What's really neat is that it also keeps track of mentioned names and places in each story, to show how much coverage that person or part of the world has received within the last 30 days.
Each item can be drilled down into a little further, which is where you can see a small one-paragraph summary and the two charts for the coverage of people and places. Each of these places and names also gets its own page that lists related news, which makes it a very topical experience. The information itself comes from Freebase, the Wikipedia-like open-database project.
Political Streams tracks popular political headlines and tracks their mentions in both traditional media and blog sources.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Much like Google's recent Blog Search page efforts, Live Labs' Political Streams also keeps track of a very important number--how long a story has continued to get play. This number stems from the first time it began getting tracked through the service's crawling engine, which doesn't necessarily dictate where it sits on the list of top stories.
One interesting thing I noticed is that the top stories on the blog side were less than half the age of those on the traditional-news side. That, of course, is bound to change, depending on the day's news.
Political Streams is the first site of its kind from the Live Labs team. I expect that we'll see additional "streams" pages for tech, world, sports, and celebrity news after the presidential election.
See also: Memeorandum and Blogrunner.
Photosynth, a technology demo from Microsoft Live Labs, has graduated from its "ooh, that's pretty" status to being a viable Web service for consumers.
The technology, which takes a grouping of photographs and stitches them into a faux 3D environment, can now be implemented with photos you've taken on your digital camera or mobile phone, and converted right on your computer. Previously, the process of stitching these photos together took weeks of processing on specially configured server arrays. With its latest version, Microsoft has managed to shrink that into around the time it takes to upload your photos.
Microsoft is giving users 20GB of online storage for their Photosynth collections. Photosynth product manager Joshua Edwards tells me this can easily fit 60 or more "synths" made up of around 150 to 200 photographs apiece--the higher end of what's recommended for what Edwards calls an optimum or "synthy" experience. Users who are making really neat collections will be granted additional space.
I spent the past few days building my own Photosynths and finally managed to get the knack for how to shoot correctly by the third one. While Microsoft has largely pushed it as a way to build jaw-dropping 3D-like environments, I'd argue to say it's a far simpler way to take super detailed shots of a wall or single room without breaking the bank on a high megapixel SLR. That said, Photosynth will take any resolution of photos you throw at it.
This synth I created uses close to 300 photos, although you can make ones with many less. Part of the creation process involves learning how to take photos for it to recognize how objects relate to one another.
(Credit: CNET Networks/Josh Lowensohn)One of the most impressive parts of Photosynth is how damn fast it is. Over a decent broadband connection you'll immediately see large thumbnails that quickly begin to sharpen as data fills in the missing pixels. You can continue to zoom into these areas and they'll sharpen up even more on some of the super high-resolution shots.
The streaming and rendering technology behind Photosynth is Seadragon, another project from the Microsoft Live Labs universe. Users have always had to download a special Seadragon-based plug-in to view other people's synths. The new twist with the latest plug-in now comes with a desktop uploader that can be used to add your own collection to the Photosynth universe. This runs with complete autonomy from your browser, so you don't have to worry about it stopping if you close out your browser. It also works in both IE 7 and Firefox 3, making it cross-platform--at least for Microsoft. If you're a Mac user looking to get your hands on some Photosynth action you'll have to keep waiting. The focus on Photosynth will remain on the PC for the time being.
One thing that's missing from this version of Photosynth is a way to synth pre-existing photo collections, or sets of photos taken from community sites. This is the most useful for things like common landmarks, and is clearly something that can be done with the right photo database--something we saw in that really nifty video from Siggraph last week. In the case of Photosynth, once you've uploaded a batch of photos you can't simply upload more to it later. Gary Flake, who heads up Microsoft's Live Labs, says this is something that's coming later on down the road. For now, you'll just have to plan ahead.
Note: We've got a video coming up soon with Flake chatting about the technology behind Photosynth. In the meantime, if you want to explore my synth of the outside of the CBS Interactive offices in downtown San Francisco, go here.
Update: Here's the video.
Update 2: Photosynth has been up and down since early Thursday morning. You can check for the status of it on the Live Labs blog.
Update 3: Site's back up.
A video from Microsoft Research and the University of Washington has been causing a stir online. The seven-minute clip, which was presented at Siggraph 2008 this week in Los Angeles, gives a small peek at some photo-viewing technology that's effectively the next generation of Photosynth, one of Microsoft Live Labs' most eye-popping technology demos.
Photosynth's technology puts hundreds of photos on a 3D map that users can browse and navigate in a similar fashion to real life. This new technology lets the viewer see several sides of a captured object using the varying angles from multiple photos. It also figures out where most of the shots have been taken to automatically create "orbits" that let users sweep around to view alternate angles--simulating distance and perspective.
One of the most amazing aspects is how selective the system is to build a better user experience. For instance, if shots come from different angles or heights, the photos will be centered or properly moved around the 3D space to make it smooth. It will also pick out only photos from a specific time of day, and make automatic color corrections to even everything out. The demo of this around the 4:17 mark is really, really cool.
While Photosynth continues to be a technology demo, here's hoping we get fun stuff like this to play with as part of popular photo-sharing sites. Users are already geotagging their shots on sites like Flickr, but the browsing experience once they're on a 2D map is a little blah. Going forward it should be all about making that viewing experience both engaging and as realistic as possible.
[via IStartedSomething]
Related: Microsoft touches up video editing
Microsoft Live Labs has a new "technology preview" for you to play with. It's called Listas and it's basically a social bookmarking service for keeping track of content you come across while browsing the Web, and sharing it with others. Users can make their own containers full of all sorts of links, and supplement it with text, images, and RSS feeds using a WYSIWYG editor or by just pasting in entire Web pages from their text clipboard. The service is being billed as a way to make lists, but I think its core appeal will ultimately end up as a Web clippings service.
Oddly enough, Microsoft has had their TagSpaces service kicking around since April. TagSpaces gives users a bookmarklet to tag any item they've come across while browsing, and drops it into a giant pool of tags for everyone. Listas is clearly a more advanced effort, and one designed to handle media and collaboration a little better.
This is what a Web page looks like when it's copied and pasted into Listas. All the links and pictures you see open up outside of the service.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Similar to other social bookmarking services, Microsoft has included a toolbar to help Listas users speed up their list creation. The toolbar borrows the idea of taking entire clips of Web content from services like Yoono, Clipmarks, and eSnips. For every little bit you grab, you can assign it to one of your pre-existing lists, or add it to a new one. There are two caveats about the toolbar though. For one, it's Internet Explorer-only. Secondly, there don't seem to be any plans to give users a Javascript bookmarklet to use like what they've done with TagSpaces (something which would add crossplatform functionality). It's also worth noting that you can accomplish the same effect of the toolbar by doing a copy and paste into a list item, which will include things like pictures, links, and embedded videos (which incidentally don't play without jettisoning you off the page).
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If you enjoyed the first round of Photosynth'd pictures of NASA shuttle Endeavor, you'll probably enjoy these. Taken in space by the crew of the International Space Station, the newly uploaded shots show off the underside of the space shuttle, which the Microsoft Labs team is touting as a "first-hand look at what you might see on a space-walk." Of course, when it comes to the underside of space shuttles, astronauts are usually inspecting these things for damage while hurtling hundreds of miles an hour above the Earth. You can do this from the comfort of your Web browser, assuming you're running Windows XP or Vista with a capable graphics card. Mac users are out of luck.
Check out the slightly singed bottom of the space shuttle Endeavor in its full, Photosynth'd glory, sans years of astronaut training and those nauseating space walks.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
Enthusiasts of Microsoft 's Live Labs project Photosynth get a new environment to explore this morning. In addition to art galleries, town squares, and various buildings in Britain, users can now explore shuttle Endeavour before its launch on Wednesday. For those unfamiliar with Photosynth, it's a new technology that groups together a collection of photos taken in the same location into a 3D environment. Users can zoom in and out of various parts to take advantage of higher resolution shots that show more detail, while getting an idea of where they are spatially. In the case of the space shuttle, there's a lot to see--especially since NASA got some of the shots with a helicopter.
Stefanie Olsen over at CNET News.com has more on the technology, along with a screenshot gallery. There's also a video about the project on the Microsoft Live Labs site. To check out the shuttle yourself, just click here. Keep in mind Photosynth requires a "Vista Aero Ready" graphics card. If you don't have one, you'll be greeted to a haiku.
Previous Photosynth coverage:
BBC show uses Microsoft tech for 3D imagery
Microsoft program turns 2D images into 3D
Related:
Google Earth now does night by NASA
Feel like a little kid again by zooming around the scaffolding of the shuttle launch pad.
(Credit: Microsoft / NASA.gov)
Microsoft announced Deepfish , a new mobile browsing technology from itslabs group. Deepfish is a small, downloadable application for Windows Smartphone users. The app presents Web content the same way you'd see it on your computer's Web browser. If you've seen the mobile version of Apple's Safari on the upcoming iPhone, then you have an idea of how Deepfish works.
Deepfish is designed like an array of photo thumbnails. To zoom into a section you want to see in more detail, you just select it with a "magnify box" controlled by your phone's directional pad or pointer. If you want to zoom back out, the original version of the page will still be loaded in your phone's memory cache--which should save a considerable amount of time (and data usage).
In our brief hands-on with it today, we noticed a few quirks.... Read more
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